Soviet Assault Engineer-Sapper Brigades and Motorized Engineer-Sapper Brigades. A unique unit designed to assault heavily fortified defenses or fortress cities. A special feature of these units are steel bibs (cuirass)
SN-42. Motorized units also had battalions of OT-34 or OT-34-85 flamethrower tanks and T-34 tanks with a mine sweep:
A total of 20 Assault Engineer-Sapper Brigades and 6 Motorized Assault Engineer-Sapper Brigades were created.
It is possible that personal armor should be separately researched and produced separately as a weapon or a tank, which requires steel to produce. Because it was originally assumed that personal armor would be produced for each soldier. The USSR began research on personal armor in 1936, later there were models of 1939 that were tested in the Soviet-Finnish War. The main armor produced was SN-42; it was tested by infantrymen, paratroopers (parachute jumps with armor), and gun crews. And recognized as successful. The final version was the SN-46 with improved armor.
Other countries also thought about protecting soldiers. And the second country that produced personal armor was Britain with
MRC body armor.
Germany used captured Soviet SN-42 and there is information that limited production of copies of Soviet armor for the SS troops.
Japan has been quite active in researching the issue of armor and producing
armor that is based on the German armor of the First World War. Also at the final stage, I
developed several armor models.
The USA produced the M2 flack vest for crews of strategic bombers, which was
used by American sappers in the assault on the Siegfried Line.